FILMHISTORIA Online Vol. 30, núm.

2 (2020) · ISSN: 2014-668X

Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Heart of

Darkness, and the Vietnam War Redux

ROBERT J. CARDULLO
University of Michigan

Abstract
This essay is a consideration of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now—in its
original as well as revised form—in light of Francis Ford Coppola’s film career, the
Vietnam War, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Keywords: Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now, Heart of Darkness,

Vietnam War.

Resumen
Este ensayo reconsidera Apocalypse Now de Francis Ford Coppola en su forma original
y revisada, a la luz de la carrera cinematográfica de Francis Ford Coppola, de la guerra
del Vietnam y de El corazón de las tinieblas de Joseph Conrad.

Palabras clave: Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now, El corazón de las

tinieblas, Guerra del Vietnam.
.

Considering Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola has an artistic problem: he is not a thinker. Indeed,

Coppola has always been short on thought; he stumbles when he thinks, when he thinks
he’s thinking. The Godfather (1972, 1974, 1990) was strongest in its execution—also its
executions—not in its adolescent implications of analogy between the Mafia and
corporate capitalism (an analogy that ignores, among other things, the Sicilian origins of
the Mafia and its blood bonds of loyalty, which have nothing to do with capitalism). The
Conversation (1974) itself faltered in its Orwellian idea-structure.
Oddly, the little-known Rain People (1969), a road picture about a young
woman’s journey toward self-discovery, may be Coppola’s most fully realized if least
spectacular film. It is more successful artistically than his films to follow because it is
filled, not with thought or the attempt at thinking, not with gaps in an ideational
framework, but with feeling. And, second, Coppola seems to have produced this movie
out of felt or at least imagined experience, as opposed to the indirect kind: his ideas about
the experience of the Mafia and the Vietnam War in America (seen on display again,
after The Godfather [I, II] and Apocalypse Now [1979], in The Cotton Club [1984] and
Gardens of Stone [1987]), as well as about the experience, chronicled in The

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Conversation, of electronic-surveillance work in the post-Watergate era. With subject

matter a few years ahead of its time, The Rain People was thus the work of a man who
had looked at (or seen through), as well as lived in, the world, and who has since seemed
content primarily to expound upon it.
Even Coppola’s scripts for others have suffered from woolly thinking: his
screenplay for Jack Clayton’s The Great Gatsby (1974), for example, turned F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s supple suggestiveness into mindless blatancy; and his scenario for Franklin
Schaffner’s Patton (1970) presented the glaringly contradictory nature of this famous
general as praiseworthy, even fathomless, complexity. That’s the top of the heap. From
there, we head down to Coppola’s blotchy script for René Clément’s Is Paris Burning?
(1966), a rambling, pseudo-documentary re-creation of the liberation of Paris from Nazi
occupation. Then we get to the adaptations of Tennessee Williams’ This Property Is
Condemned and Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye, for Sydney Pollack
(1966) and John Huston (1967) respectively, in which Coppola—who began his career in
the early 1960s as a director of short sex films—manages to denude the world of
Southern Gothicism of all but its trash, its kinkiness, and its pretense.
In Apocalypse Now, Coppola’s attempts to dramatize private moral agony and
general moral abyss during the Vietnam War were disjointed, assumptive, and weak, for
all of Vittorio Storaro’s aptly hallucinogenic color cinematography. When I read, three
years before the making of this film, that Storaro had been chosen as the
cinematographer, I have to say I was shocked. The lush Vogue-style photographer of
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) and The Conformist (1970), for a
picture that was being billed as the definitive epic about Vietnam! But, as it turns out, the
fine moments in Apocalypse Now depend heavily on what Storaro can do for them.

Apocalypse Now and Vietnam

Because Apocalypse Now, despite its director’s claims for its moral stature,
despite its simplistic relation to Joseph Conrad’s
novella Heart of Darkness (1899)—on
which Coppola and John Milius’s screenplay is overtly modeled (though it also has
something in common with Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God [1972])—is at
its best in delivering the texture of the first freaked-out, pill-popping, rock-accompanied
war. For the American forces, Vietnam seems to have been divided pretty much between
military virtuosi, grateful for any chance to exercise their skills, and most of the troops,
who never believed in anything except the possibility of being killed, who were
tormented by fear and pointlessness into rank barbarities and new pits of racism. Pinched
between a growing anti-war movement at home and an unwinnable war in front of them,
these soldiers suffered; and their suffering was often transmuted into gross slaughter, into
heavy drugging, into hysterical hilarity set to music. It’s this wild psychedelic war, much
more a jungle discotheque with butchery than face-in-the-mud naturalism, that Coppola
understands and renders well. And for this splashy fantasy on a war that was hideously
fantastic, Storaro’s boutique eye is perfect.
In London I was once interviewed for a BBC program about Vietnam films, and I
was asked about the effect of TV coverage on the making of fictional movies about
Vietnam. I forget what I answered, but I remembered the question during Apocalypse
Now, which I didn’t see until I came home. The film libraries are full of newsreel footage
of this century’s bloodshed, but Vietnam was the first living-room war (in Michael
Arlen’s phrase from 1969). I think that Coppola, together with his co-scenarist John
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Milius, anticipated the BBC question and decided that the picture had to be something
other in texture than representation, had to lift past what television had made familiar.
This is a trip film, an acid war. Again, Storaro was the right choice to shoot it.
Everything in the picture that tends toward this aim is superb. A devastating
helicopter attack on a Viet Cong village at a delta, in which the planes broadcast both
“The Ride of the Valkyries” (from Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre [1870]) and napalm,
after which some of the victors go surfing, after which one helicopter drops a river patrol
boat into position for a journey upstream; a stop at a depot upcountry that is like a
shopping mall misplaced; a sudden encounter up that river with a USO girlie revue
(featuring Playboy bunnies) in a huge amphitheater surrounded by giant phallic
missiles—a performance that ends in an attempt at mass rape; a lighted bridge that looks
like a misplaced festival float; the boat crew’s nervous destruction of a family on a
sampan; the arrival of the patrol boat at
its destination, a temple deep in the
jungle,
gliding in between canoes filled
with hundreds of silent, carefully observant, white-
daubed natives in a
scene that marries the archetypal
jungle-princess movie to the
Babylon
sequence in D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916)—these scenes, and more like
them, show Coppola at his height. He likes size, and he can use it. Of course one can
argue that other American directors, given tens of millions of dollars to burn, might also
produce moments of sweep and flourish, and Coppola surely couldn’t have done it
without money. But, in this regard at least, he uses the money well, to give himself the
orchestrated crowds, the immense vistas, the stunning juxtapositions that lie aptly within
his talent, his apparent sense, on display as never before (or since) in Apocalypse Now,
that the world is seen most truthfully when it is seen as spectacle.

The very first sequence itself is discouraging, however. In Vietnam in 1968, the
protagonist, an army intelligence captain named Benjamin L. Willard, is seen close-up
and upside down, then bits and pieces of his dingy, sepia-toned Saigon hotel room are
filtered in, like a record-album-cover montage. He’s sweat-bathed, drunk, and drinking;
he smashes a mirror with his fist. There are panning shots of his dog tag, a pile of bills,
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his wallet, a woman’s picture, an opened letter and envelope, cigarettes, a glass and
liquor bottle, and a gun lying next to his pillow. Willard then starts his voice-over
narration, which was written by the former war correspondent Michael Herr (author of
the admirable Dispatches [1977]) and is surprisingly flatulent. The symbols of disorder
are stale. Any union in anguish between him and us is thus missed from the start; from
that point on, Willard’s moral pilgrimage is fabricated while his physical pilgrimage is
vivid. (It must be said, though, that the opening dissolves and superimpositions of
Willard’s face over a rotating ceiling fan and a helicopter attack demonstrate one
advantage of Coppola’s video editing system, which enabled him to transfer footage to
videotape, edit the tape, and then conform the 70mm print of the film to the edited tape.
On the video editing machine of this period, the filmmaker could easily build up the
visual image in layers, thereby avoiding use of the expensive, time-consuming optical
printer and the film lab normally needed to achieve such superimpositions and dissolves.)
Willard is subsequently ordered, by two grim military superiors and a CIA
operative, to make his way upriver to the station of a brilliant Green Beret colonel gone
AWOL named Walter E. Kurtz, who has apparently become imperially insane, madly
dangerous, egomaniacal and murderous. From inside neutral, neighboring Cambodia, he
is waging his own ferocious, independent war against Vietnamese intelligence agents
with a guerrilla Montagnard, or Hmong, army. Willard’s top-secret mission—and he has
had missions like this before—is to “terminate” Kurtz. A river patrol boat and crew of
four are put at Willard’s disposal. Journeying through hazards and strange encounters, he
finds Kurtz ensconced in majesty in the ruins of an ancient Cambodian temple, a self-
appointed god who rules his band of native warriors from a jungle outpost. After some
time and some gnomic conversation between the two men, Willard completes his
mission, which is in essence a journey into the heart of the Vietnam War, and starts
home.

Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness

One immediate difference from Heart of Darkness, other than the obvious ones of
time and place, is that Conrad’s protagonist, Charles Marlow, encounters African
mysteries for the first time as he travels up a river into the Congo, but Coppola’s Willard
is a weathered veteran of this war. The opening sequence of Apocalypse Now, where he
boozes it up in isolation in his hotel room, suggests that he is recovering from a recent,
probably similar jungle experience (as well as from marital divorce). This difference
from Marlow lessens the reactive power of the battle-fatigued Willard and makes him
even more passive, more of an observer, than he was bound to be anyway through most
of the film.
The screenplay otherwise suffers from its reliance on Conrad because it does not
rely on him heavily enough. Milius and Coppola took an armature from Conrad, the
journey into the interior to find the heart of darkness, the darkest reaches of the human
psyche, but what they produced was a tour of a terrible war with a spurious finish. The
war sequences here rank with those of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) and
Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) in their bitter fierceness, and nothing that scarifies the
Vietnam debacle can be unworthy; but Conrad was grappling with immensity, not
specifics. Several times in Apocalypse Now people say that human beings contain both
good and evil, but this is mild stuff compared with what Conrad implies by “the horror.”

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At the end of the film, after killing Kurtz, Willard departs, making his way
through a host of natives who let him pass. There’s a slight hint that he might himself
take over this Doré kingdom, but it passes. (Apparently the meekness of these warriors
who had been devoted to Kurtz is based on J. G. Frazer’s thesis in The Golden Bough
[1890]—a book that happens to be part of Kurtz’s small library—that, in the eyes of the
worshippers, he who kills the god becomes the god.) Slowly, as the riverboat departs, the
screen goes to black, and we hear Kurtz repeating, “The horror. The horror.” But the true
horror Apocalypse Now is not what Kurtz mouths in imitation of Conrad: it is the war
itself.
On Willard’s journey upriver, the boat is attacked first by machine gun, then by
arrows, then by spear. But the message—that we’re burrowing down layer by layer—is
too patent to affect us. Politically, too, the film is empty, but then it doesn’t have much
political ambition. What it wants is to be a moral allegory, like its Conradian model, and
there it fizzles completely. Unlike the experiences in Heart of Darkness, those along the
way in this picture do not knit toward a final episode of revelation, throwing
retrospective light. No theme is developed. Apocalypse Now is finally a string of set-
pieces, through which we are teased with advance data about a warring eccentric who
turns out to be more or less what we expect.

Coppola’s Kurtz is just a literature-lacquered version of the arch-villain in

Richard Donner’s Superman film (1978) or in the James Bond scripts: a mastermind who
has seen through the spurious niceties of human behavior. Kurtz was a top officer with
every chance to go higher, who at age thirty-eight opted to become a paratrooper,
ostensibly because (like T. E. Lawrence) he wanted to take the difficult route, to test
himself. Yet this lover of the knife-edge has only recently discovered that war is horrible.
The turning point came for him after he led some men into a village to inoculate children
against polio. The Viet Cong slithered in after he had left and cut off the inoculated arms
of all the children. (Note: a number of Vietnam War authorities at the time objected to
the Russian-roulette scene in The Deer Hunter because they knew no basis for it in fact.
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Is there any basis for this inoculation story? If not, what was holding up the experts’
objections? The fact that, in this film, we also see Americans murdering Vietnamese?) It
seems a bit late in Kurtz’s day for him to become, like Albert Camus’s Caligula (from the
1945 play), a murderer as a defense against the horrors of murder everywhere.
Kurtz’s quotations from Conrad and from T. S. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow
Men” (in which Eliot quoted Conrad) are glib attempts to enlarge him. His own dialogue
is larded with what I’d call soundtrack profundities. “You have the right to kill me,” he
tells Willard, “you have no right to judge me.” Try that on your piano. As with the
quotations, Coppola tries to deepen the picture, literally, with deep sound. Over and over
again, the score hits ultra-low notes—made electronically or with an organ? —that shake
the theater like Sensurround, an aural caricature of the picture’s frantic, failed ambition to
delve.

Performances at War

That Apocalypse Now ultimately falls short of what it might have been begins
with the casting, particularly of Willard. The list of actors who turned down the role is
saddening: Jack Nicholson, who was one of them, would by his very presence have
enriched the picture. Martin Sheen, who got the role, was a much-delayed choice.
Coppola actually started shooting with Harvey Keitel as Willard (after considering Steve
McQueen for the part) but, after a few weeks, was dissatisfied and replaced him. Sheen,
the supposed improvement, who has given good performances in the past, is utterly
inadequate here. It’s as if a gas-station attendant had been sent on this mission. Since
Willard is only an observer through most of the story, the role needs innate force to keep
it from being torpid. Sheen is limp and flat.
Marlon Brando, as Kurtz, is bald in several ways, shorn of hair and power,
posturing and pompous. Brando seems to have put Coppola in a bind. The director got
the powerful actor he wanted and then was stuck with him (though he thought of
replacing Brando with Orson Welles). It’s easy to see that Brando is merely teasing the
director, providing a minimum of energy. We’re told that Brando insisted on improvising
some of his dialogue; this malfeasance was, apparently, another egotistical stunt that
Coppola simply had to endure. Caught between an inadequate leading man and a
capricious capital figure, the picture has to depend almost desperately on Storaro’s
camera, which is prodigal with several kinds of beauty, and on the rest of the actors, who
are helpful with the exception of the otherwise redoubtable Robert Duvall. He is pallid
here as the crazy, battle-hungry helicopter commander, Lt. Colonel Kilgore, and not
always comprehensible; what’s worse, in his old-style cavalry hat, Duvall looks like
Truman Capote at a costume party.
Apocalypse Now ultimately reduces to the story of a special-services assassin sent
to kill a grander assassin, with a décor of eye-filling adventures along the way; but with
nothing at the end except that, just as predicted, the victim is an inflated lunatic. What
moral experience is in it for Willard? None. What moral insight is given into the Vietnam
War? None. Coppola and Milius simply clung to the framework of their great, Conradian
model, hoping that it would aggrandize their film in the way they hoped that quotations
would aggrandize Kurtz.

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The Return of Apocalypse Now

Then, in 2001, came Apocalypse Now Redux. Very near the end of the lengthy
closing credits for the new version comes the line: “Portions of this film were released in
1979 under the title Apocalypse Now.” If the first version was incomplete, the word
“redux” (“brought back,” “returned”) doesn’t apply. And the word “portion” doesn’t
nearly reflect the sizes of the two versions: Version Two is 202 minutes long, but
Version One was 153 minutes, hardly a mere “portion” of what is now released. Still, if
this statement really is Coppola’s view, why did he snuggle it away so coyly, and for so
long?
The chief restorations are two sequences that were deleted in 1979 for reasons of
narrative pace, so clearly Coppola’s view of that pace has altered. Both sequences take
place along the river. First, after the Playboy episode, the patrol boat encounters the
Playboy helicopter downed upriver, in a remote base camp, for lack of fuel. The
chopper’s occupants have sought refuge during a fierce and torrential rainstorm in a
disorganized, muddy medical-evacuation center. A deal is made by Willard with the
Playboy manager, and in exchange for some of the boat’s fuel, members of its crew are
allowed to visit the bunnies in their helicopter as well as in some tents nearby (a kind of
“frontier town” reminiscent of the one in Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller
[1971]). The sequence is entirely gratuitous: it seems to have been contrived, and not
very deftly, to get some sex into the picture. (Willard does not participate.)

The second big restoration is at least more germane. The boat reaches a French-
owned plantation in Cambodia, replete with a luxurious house, a small private army, and
a large French family in residence. (Possibly such anomalies existed—French plantations
safe even though the Viet Minh had hated the French long before the Americans came.)
The sequence has a double purpose. First, during the conversation at the dinner table at
which Willard is a guest with the family, the French patriarch expounds the French claim
that they had been here for more than a century and that in their own Vietnam war they
had at least been fighting for what they believed was theirs. The Americans are fighting

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for nothing, he says scornfully. Then, later, the patriarch’s widowed daughter-in-law
visits Willard’s bedroom, where she delivers the following bit of simulated sagacity:
“There are two of you. Don’t you see? One that kills and one that loves.”
This long sequence is a doubtful blessing. The patriarch’s speech is a blatant
insert. Possibly it would have had some impact in 1979, before the Vietnam War was so
thoroughly exposed as an American governmental deception and blunder. Even then it
would have seemed mechanical, but now it is also superfluous (like the subsequent,
restored monologue in which Kurtz, surrounded by Cambodian children, quotes from a
lie-riddled, flag-waving Time magazine article, from September 22, 1967, about the
“progress” of the Vietnam War). The chief interest in the scene is purely cinematic, a
Coppola touch. The family has seated Willard on the eastern side of the dinner table so
that, through all the speechifying, he is bothered by the setting sun and has to shade his
eyes. He has been put, so to speak, on the solar spot. As for the bedroom scene, it serves
only to give Willard some sex without Playboy grossness.
About these restorations Coppola misjudged. Apocalypse Now is one of the few
instances where inclusion of outtakes has not helped. (Another was Steven Spielberg’s
Close Encounters of the Third Kind [1977].) His film was better off as it was. Still, its re-
issue, even as expanded, gave us the chance to confirm that it is, though ruptured, a
major work. The very concept of the film is large-scale and daring, immediately
absorbing. The sheer ozone of the enterprise clearly exalted Coppola throughout. He
himself has used the term “operatic” about the picture—he confirms it with the use of
“The Ride of the Valkyries” during the helicopter raid—and it has the breadth, artistic
embrace, and floridity that the word “opera” suggests.

The Record of Apocalypse Now

A documentary about the film’s chaotic making, shot in part by Coppola’s wife,
Eleanor, and including interviews with most of the cast and crew, appeared in 1991 with
the title Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. Details of the difficulties during
the two years of shooting are by now also well lodged in numerous articles and books—
one book by Eleanor Coppola herself. (There was even an Off-Broadway play about the
travails of making this film: all names were changed, of course.) Herewith a few of those
difficulties. When Coppola began shooting Apocalypse Now in the Philippines in March
1976 (after pre-production work that began in mid-1975), the film’s budget was $12
million, and the picture was set for release in April of 1977. But a series of setbacks
slowed down production and drove up costs: along with extra-marital affairs, a suicidal
director, drug use, and other forms of madness, a typhoon named Olga halted the
shooting schedule for seven weeks; Marlon Brando, whose character was originally a
lean, physically fit Green Beret (Conrad’s Kurtz himself was gaunt and even emaciated),
showed up in the Philippines weighing 285 pounds (only to become even more bloated
later in life) and had to embark on a crash diet; Martin Sheen had a near-fatal heart attack
and could not work for several weeks; and throughout the scriptwriting and shooting
phases of the production, Coppola had difficulty in choosing an ending for the film. By
the time Apocalypse Now was released in August of 1979, its budget had climbed to over
$30 million, $18 million of which came from Coppola’s personal assets and loans.
Still, despite the recurrent obstacles, the picture glows with Francis Ford
Coppola’s eagerness, ambition, and talent. Nominated for eight Academy Awards
(including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay), the film won only two,
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though they were well-deserved: Best Cinematography and Best Sound. It was also
awarded the prestigious Palme d’Or (top prize, shared with Volker Schlöndorff’s Tin
Drum [1979]) at the Cannes Festival. Despite being plagued by numerous delays and cost
overruns during its lengthy production period, then, Apocalypse Now may just be—for all
its flaws—the definitive Vietnam War film. The journey upriver unrolls before us,
synesthetically speaking, like a visible tone poem, one whose sometimes surreal images
indelibly sear the memory.

Bibliography & Works Cited

Adair, Gilbert. Vietnam on Film: From The Green Berets to Apocalypse Now. New
York: Proteus, 1981.
Arlen, Michael J. Living-Room War. New York: Viking, 1969.
Chown, Jeffrey. Hollywood Auteur: Francis Coppola. New York: Praeger, 1988.
Coppola, Eleanor. Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1979.
Cowie, Peter. The Apocalypse Now Book. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo, 2001.
Cowie, Peter. Coppola. 1989. London: André Deutsch, 2013.
Dittmar, Linda, and Gene Michaud, eds. From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam
War in American Film. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990.
French, Karl. Apocalypse Now: A Bloomsbury Movie Guide. London: Bloomsbury,
1998.
Goodwin, Michael. On the Edge: The Life and Times of Francis Coppola. New York:
William Morrow, 1989.
Hagen, William M. “Apocalypse Now (1979): Joseph Conrad and the Television
War.” In Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context. Ed. Peter
C. Rollins. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983. 230-245.
Johnson, Robert K. Francis Ford Coppola. Boston: Twayne, 1977.
Lewis, Jon. Whom God Wishes to Destroy . . .: Francis Coppola and the New
Hollywood. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995.
Milius, John, & Francis Ford Coppola. Apocalypse Now Redux: An Original
Screenplay. New York: Talk Miramax Books/Hyperion, 2001.

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Phillips, Gene D., & Rodney Hill, eds. Francis Ford Coppola: Interviews. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2004.
Phillips, Gene D. Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2004.
Schumacher, Michael. Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life. New York:
Crown Publishers, 1999.
Travers, Steven. Coppola’s Monster Film: The Making of Apocalypse Now.
Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland 2016.
Welsh, James W., Phillips, Gene D., & Rodney Hill. The Francis Ford Coppola
Encyclopedia. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2010.
Zuker, Joel S. Francis Ford Coppola: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston:
G. K. Hall, 1984.

Apocalypse Now (1979):

Director: Francis Ford Coppola. Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius, & Michael
Herr, based on the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. Cinematographer: Vittorio
Storaro. Editors: Lisa Fruchtman, Gerald B. Greenberg, Walter Murch. Music: Carmine Coppola, Francis
Ford Coppola; Jim Morrison & The Doors (“This Is the End”). Production Designers: Dean Tavoularis,
Angelo Graham, Bob Nelson. Sound Designers: Walter Murch, Mark Berger, Richard Beggs, Nat Boxer.
Running time: 153 minutes; 202 min (Redux)
Format: 70mm (initial release; later released in 35mm), in color
Cast: Marlon Brando (Col. Walter E. Kurtz), Robert Duvall (Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore), Martin Sheen
(Capt. Benjamin L. Willard), Frederic Forrest (Jay “Chef” Hicks), Albert Hall (Chief Phillips), Sam
Bottoms (Lance B. Johnson), Larry Fishburne (Tyrone “Clean” Miller), Dennis Hopper (Photojournalist),
Harrison Ford (Col. Lucas), G. D. Spradlin (Gen. Corman), Scott Glenn (Lt. Richard M. Colby), Cynthia
Wood (Playmate of the Year), Glenn Walken (Lt. Carlsen), Herb Rice (Roach), Richard Marks
(Narrator), Christian Marquand (Hubert de Marais, Redux version only), Aurore Clément (Roxanne
Sarrault, Redux version only), Michel Patton (Philippe de Marais, Redux version only), Frank Villard
(Gaston de Marais, Redux version only), David Olivier (Christian de Marais, Redux version only),
Chrystel Le Pelletier (Claudine, Redux version only), Robert Julian (Tutor, Redux version only), Yvon
LeSeaux (Sgt. Le Fevre, Redux version only), Roman Coppola (Francis de Marais, Redux version only),
Gian-Carlo Coppola (Gilles de Marais, Redux version only)
Francis Ford Coppola (born 1939)
Dementia 13 (1963)
You’re a Big Boy Now (1966)
Finian’s Rainbow (1968)
The Rain People (1969)
The Godfather (1972)
The Conversation (1974)
The Godfather Part II (1974)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
One From the Heart (1982)
The Outsiders (1983)
Rumble Fish (1983)
The Cotton Club (1984)
Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)
Gardens of Stone (1987)
Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)
The Godfather Part III (1990)
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
Jack (1996)
The Rainmaker (1997)
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Youth without Youth (2007)

Tetro (2009)
Twixt (2011)
Distant Vision (2015)

Filmography: Key Vietnam War Films

The Green Berets (1968), directed by Ray Kellogg & John Wayne
The Boys in Company C (1977), directed by Sidney J. Furie
Coming Home (1978), directed by Hal Ashby
The Deer Hunter (1978), directed by Michael Cimino
Go Tell the Spartans (1978), directed by Ted Post
Apocalypse Now (1979), directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Streamers (1983), directed by Robert Altman
Purple Hearts (1984), directed by Sidney J. Furie
The Killing Fields (1984), directed by Roland Joffé
Platoon (1986), directed by Oliver Stone
Full Metal Jacket (1987), directed by Stanley Kubrick
Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), directed by Barry Levinson
Hamburger Hill (1987), directed by John Irvin
The Hanoi Hilton (1987), directed by Lionel Chetwynd
84 Charlie MoPic (1988), directed by Patrick Sheane Duncan
Casualties of War (1989), directed by Brian De Palma
Born on the Fourth of July (1989), directed by Oliver Stone
In Country (1989), directed by Norman Jewison
Flight of the Intruder (1991), directed by John Milius
Heaven & Earth (1993), directed by Oliver Stone
A Bright Shining Lie (1998), directed by Terry George
Faith of My Fathers (1999), directed by Peter Markle
Tigerland (2000), directed by Joel Schumacher
Under Heavy Fire (a.k.a. Going Back, 2001), directed by Sidney J. Furie
Path to War (2002), directed by John Frankenheimer
We Were Soldiers (2002), directed by Randall Wallace
Rescue Dawn (2006), directed by Werner Herzog
Tunnel Rats (2007), directed by Uwe Boll.

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